Will Joey Ingram Complete His Mandarin Challenge?

Poker player and podcast phenom Joey Ingram has taken on a new challenge for his loyal fanbase. In a year’s time, he will learn to speak Mandarin well enough to only speak that language during an entire podcast.

If Ingram succeeds, he gets back the $7,500 he’s putting on the line, in addition to the combined $45,000 friends Peter Jennings and Jonathan Bales are risking.

This Mandarin Challenge is the latest in a long line of unique, personalized prop bets where Joey Ingram puts his money where his mouth is and takes on interesting prop bets.

You can see Ingram’s excitement and all of the details in one of his recent YouTube videos that breaks it down:

Not Just a Personality

An experienced poker player and fan of all things gambling, Ingram has morphed from a casual poker enthusiast to a legit personality over the years. He’s even started an ambitious “season” on YouTube which allows his fans to follow along as he tries to make over $500,000 in Pot Limit Omaha at Bovada:

Ingram boasts over 34,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel due to his outlandish props, his unique show format, high-level guests and his genuine personality.

This crazy prop bet is what catches our eye here, as this is just not something you see all the time. Not only is Ingram completely transparent about the wagers, the people and money to do with them and how he plans on completing them, but the subject matter is also highly engaging.

This particular challenge has Ingram really working against the clock, as he gets just one year to learn an extremely complicated language (seriously, I know people who took it for two years and can still barely offer complete sentences).

Truly, it’s notoriously known for being one of the hardest languages to learn, let alone fully grasp and speak fluently.

Beyond just knowing words or being able to force his way through a conversation or two, Ingram is going to need to know this language front and back to the point where he can get through an entire 30-minute podcast.

Even if he learns the language in time and is ready to accomplish this ambitious feat, he can’t slip up during the podcast. It’s a very interesting bet and there is a lot of money at stake with fellow grinders – FantasyLabs.com’s own Bales and Jennings – putting up the money.

Betting on Ingram

The best part is whether or not Joey Ingram makes good on his latest prop bet, you can win some cash, too.

BetOnline is so far the lone entertainment betting site to offer a wager on this Mandarin Challenge, asking us all of Ingram will actually come through and get the job done:

Yes +600

No -1000

Learning Mandarin well enough to accomplish what Joey Ingram is trying to accomplish would take roughly 2,200 “class hours” or about 88 weeks.

It’s unclear just how much free time Ingram has to dedicate solely to understanding this language or just how easily it’s going to be for him personally to comprehend. However, considering there are on average just 52 weeks in a calendar year, this looks like a lost cause.

Perhaps Ingram is going to go over and beyond to learn Mandarin or he already has some background we don’t know about. Maybe he’s just a really quick learner. Whatever the case, he’s surely going to want to make this happen, as he’s risking $7,500 of his own cash and there is a big payday at the end of the road.

Unfortunately, we’re with BetOnline on this one – not to mention Bales and Jennings. Learning Mandarin in just one year to the point where Ingram will be able to produce spoken content for 30 full minutes is just asking too much.

The publicity his YouTube channel will get from this will probably cancel out the money he’d be losing, but actually coming through on this bet feels like a massive long shot. We can dream big and cheer him on ($100 would return $600 if we did it), but we’d either bet against it or avoid it, altogether.

Regardless of what happens, these unique, personalized prop bets are awesome to see in the media and we hope to see more of them. We’ll also keep tabs on Ingram’s progress and he’s got a subscriber in us for his day to day YouTube channel, too.

All of that being said, we’re siding with the “no” angle in this prop bet.